From Wonder to Anger: Rethinking The Showman and the Slave Through Standpoint Theory

Wonder exalts its object. Can it also degrade? This question was a central interpretive tension guiding the author's archival research and analysis when he set out to write his first book almost 30 years ago, about a 19th-century woman who was simultaneously degraded-for her race, her disability, her old age, and her enslavement-and lionized for the stories she had to tell and for the symbolism of her very existence. The author reflects on how his fascination with the story he was recovering in the archives reflected his "positionality," or the ways in which his social identity shaped his understanding. A reading of a recent collection of poems by Bettina Judd reimagining the same story helped clarify both what his own standpoint allowed him to see, and what he missed.